This class has been a challenge. Not because I do not understand Project Based Learning, but because I simply have not had time to process and create. I feel that the aspects of Project Based Learning that I understand best are the Driving Question and the Entry Event. The Driving Question is essential to PBL, because it guides the inquiry. Students should be required to dig into the material and come to their own conclusions. In order for this to happen, the question must be open-ended and not tied to a specific event or time period (if possible). The Entry Event is where you grab the students’ interest. If the Entry Event is not compelling, if the problem or project you present is not interesting, then Project Based Learning will not attract the students any more than direct instruction because the work will just seem like work.

I don’t think that there is anything about Project Based Learning that I don’t understand, but what has challenged me most is managing the process. I understand the concepts, but I know that I struggle with balancing direct instruction and independent learning. I tend to instruct too much or let the students have so much freedom that they don’t really know what to do. The key is to try to prepare as much of the material ahead as possible. I know my students will need some instruction on source citation and on research. I also know that they will need some guidance on organizing their notes. I can prepare materials in anticipation of their questions. Another key to my struggle with managing the process is time. I need to be sure that I have time to check the students’ work so that they can receive feedback. Formative assessments aren’t really formative if you never grade them. Because of time constraints in the past, that has actually happened. I hope that by preparing all of the rubrics ahead of time (I know; it’s obvious) I will be better prepared to evaluate the students’ progress and determine their needs as we progress through the project.

I came into this class without any real expectations about what I would learn, but I have learned so much. PBL is similar to Understanding by Design in many ways, so I was familiar with the process of backward design and driving, or essential, questions. What is different, is the focus on the project teaching the content, rather than demonstrating understanding of the content. Using the project to teach makes so much sense. As I read the class materials and the textbook, I realized that this was what I already believed. What I didn’t know was how to implement it. Having to create an organized website for someone else to use has helped me to focus and to plan ahead. If I had come up with my project ideas during the school year, not as part of a graded class, I would have jumped in and expected the students to figure things out with me, without any support materials in place – no rubrics, no templates, no instructions. I would have conducted an Entry Event and orally given the students directions. This is what I have done in the past. So having to create a project for a grade has forced me to slow down and plan out every aspect of the project before using it. I have learned to slow down and to plan ahead. I have learned to force myself to pay attention to the details. I am still plugging all of the details into my website, I have a lot of materials to create, but I feel more organized and my ideas feel more well-thought-out than in the past.

I plan to use my Lead an Expedition project with my students this year. We start school next week and will probably start the project in mid-September. We will not work exclusively on the project, because we need to spend time on literature as well, but I am excited to see how it plays out. Since this is supposed to be part of a larger, year-long project, I plan to work out the details for part II as soon as possible and possibly implement that part of the project this year. As a teacher leader at my school, I plan to encourage other teachers to work collaboratively with me to develop this project, and a couple of others I have in mind, into interdisciplinary projects. This particular project would work best with social studies, but I have a couple of ideas that would work well with science as well.

In all, this class has been invaluable to my education. I didn’t necessarily learn any new content, but I have learned to slow down and prepare in detail. Now I just need to learn to speed up the process of preparing materials.

Here is the link to my PBL website. I am still determining the overall project title, but I have renamed the Part I project to Lead an Expedition. If I have time, I may reorganize the site to separate the three projects that make up the larger, year-long project.

Debriefing is an important part of the PBL process. Once a project is over, you need to analyze what worked and what did not. For instance, in planning my Create-a-Civilization project, I am unsure about the overall project timeline. So, assessing how well the project worked in my 3 month time frame will be part of my debriefing process. To determine whether the time frame is appropriate, I will look at what each student learned and was able to accomplish during the project, as well as solicit feedback from the students. Since I am not collaborating with another teacher on this project, I will ask for feedback from colleagues, but the student, and even parent, feedback will be more useful.

To begin the debriefing, I will ask students to write about how they felt about the project. Although I want this discussion to be as open-ended as possible, I will provide students with some questions to answer so that they don’t just say they liked it or didn’t like it and then not give any more input. I will ask the students to discuss how they felt about the amount of time provided, the access to resources to complete the project, the grouping strategies, and the materials provided. I will try to keep questions about these components as open-ended as possible.

On my own, I will look at the quality of the assessments, both formative and summative, and the students performance on those assessments. I will decide whether students needed more support, whether the assessments were clear and well-structured, and whether the assessments really assess the learning objectives.

Assessment of a PBL is not a one-time process. It should occur before and after you use the unit. I also think it is useful to reflect on the effectiveness of the PBL throughout the school year, each time the students are required to retrieve content knowledge or use skills that should have been learned during the unit. Is it an effective PBL unit if the students cannot replicate the skills months later? In order to keep a record of my reflections, I will probably create a hidden blog page on the PBL website. This will allow me to keep all of my materials for the PBL in one place. If I decide that my reflections would be useful to someone else, I will make the page public.

As I include more project-based learning in my classroom, I will have to change the way I teach. I have always enjoyed having my students complete projects to learn, and I have required them to work in groups, but I haven’t always adequately prepared materials in advance of projects. One thing I will have to change about my teaching is that I will need to prepare far in advance. Rather than creating a rubric days before a project is due (or just grading without one), I will need to create, or include my students in creating, a rubric that spells out the requirements of the project, and I will need to create the rubric before introducing my students to the project through the entry event.

Another change that I will need to make for effective PBL to occur in my classroom, is that I need to be a better facilitator. In the past, I have over-helped student groups while moving around the room to check on them. Or, I have gone to the other extreme and completely ignored the students and graded papers while they worked. I will need to move around the room with purpose and be prepared to steer students in the right direction without over-directing or making decisions for them.

I believe that the project I am currently designing will be a good project for students to learn the skills they will need to complete other assignments. The purpose of the project is for students to practice research and writing skills, which are basic skills they would need to complete any future projects. I am hoping that this project will prepare my students for the rest of the school year. I plan to begin this project about 3 weeks into the school year, so my students will be well-prepared for future writing assignments. This project will also introduce my students to the themes of Need and Choice which we will use to examine literature throughout the year.

The main change I will need to make as a teacher, is to prepare ahead of time for projects. I often have an idea, usually of epic proportions, and I jump right into it the next day (or later the same day) without taking the time to prepare materials, decide upon final products, or determine its requirements. To be successful in using PBL as an instructional strategy, I will need to slow down, organize, and prepare in advance. Once a project is up and running I am usually adept at mentoring students in completing it, if it has been properly designed. So, the real change will be taking time to completely design projects in advance.

Here is the website for my current PBL, (currently titled) What do You Need?

Over the past 3 weeks I have had the opportunity to analyze my school’s technology plan. This was a difficult assignment because I have always been frustrated by my school’s lack of technology, or a real plan to acquire and use it, but the other teachers and administrators at my school, have been proud of how much technology we have. When I moved here from Idaho 10 years ago. the school I had been student teaching at had the same number of students at my current school. It also had 5 or 6 open computer labs and 5 or 6 classroom labs. Teacher computers were replaced every three years. I couldn’t understand why the situation was so different in my new district in California until I understood the demographics. 70% of the students at my school are on free or reduced lunch. That’s much larger than the school I was at in Idaho.

Regardless of income, a school can and should have a plan. I was embarrassed to look at my school’s plan, especially because I’m on the technology team, because there isn’t really a plan. California now ties funding to LCAP plans. Those plans include a technology plan and the state department of education has requirements about what a technology plan has to look like. My school’s plan looks nothing like that. It is really truly a list, with items crossed out and in different colored ink. We have a lot of work to do. I plan to mention our lack of a real plan at our technology team meeting this week. I’m not sure I’ll be very popular when I point out that we need to create a formal plan and invite parents and students to give input. If we don’t do those things, we can’t move forward.

The NMC Horizon Report is an annual report that looks at emerging technologies and their potential impact on teaching, learning, and creativity in schools. After reading the 2014 K-12 report, I initially wanted to look further into hybrid learning because, in the report, it sounded like it involved a blend of regular classroom activities and online components. However, as I began reading the related articles and looking at resources, I realized that hybrid learning was more systemic than classroom-based. Since I am looking for ways to flip my classroom, not implement a blended online/brick-and-mortar learning system, I decided to explore other options. Rereading the report, I realized that Open Educational Resources was really where I wanted to place my focus.

Open Educational Resources, or OERs, are free, usually in both economic and ownership (copyright) terms. OERs are a trend that, according to the Horizon report, will be drive “educational technology adoption in schools within three to five years” (Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., and Freeman, A. 2014. p. 10-11). One reason I chose to explore this trend is because I need resources for my own classes and do not want to spend the time to create them all myself. I was happy to find several quality interactive products for my students to use both for instruction and for product creation.

After looking at the examples and at what other students had created for this assignment’s artifact, I had a hard time deciding what to do with the information I had gathered. I knew that I wanted to do some sort of presentation, but I haven’t practiced with any screen capture software yet and I knew I didn’t have time to play with those. As I continued to look at open educational resources, I came across a discussion of Explain Everything, an iOS app. It costs $2.99, but even after just using it once I think it is absolutely worth paying for. Click here for to visit MorrisCooke.com and see a video demonstrating Explain Everything’s capabilities. I used screen shots that I took of the OERs with my iPad, so the resolution isn’t great, but it was really simple to import them into Explain Everything as I created slides. You can add items to a slide, then narrate, and then add more and continue your narration on the same slide. When your presentation is completely finished, you can upload it to pretty much anything. I chose YouTube, because I had included animation and narration. There were other video-hosting sites available for the upload, but I would have had to create accounts for them. It took about 15 minutes to render the presentation as an mp4 and upload it to YouTube.

Here is the link to my video

After an hour of re-recording, I decided to stop playing back my narration fixing it, so you will notice that around 7:30, on and off for about a minute, my voice is muffled. I think I covered the microphone on my iPad. I also realize that I forgot to revisit my informal student survey about the problems they had trying to use Google Classroom and Google Docs. Here is the link to the Google Doc where I wrote my questions and the number of students who had problems which problems.

*My final note – I enjoyed the suggestions on this post about hosting a BYOOER Party. It talks about working with your colleagues to collect Open Educational Resources that they, and you, have found or created. Why reinvent the wheel?

This week I completed an APA Annotated Bibliography assignment. I decided to focus my research on flipping the classroom, since I have been looking at ways to do it for the past couple of years. One difficulty I’ve had with flipping my classroom is that there isn’t much guidance out there for doing it in a language arts class. I follow a couple of high school teachers on YouTube and I check their blogs, but other than that I couldn’t find much. Sad to say, that has not changed much. For this assignment we had to find peer-reviewed journal articles. I found hundreds of articles on flipping the classroom, but almost all of them were college-level science or applied arts classes, or they were from conferences. We were supposed to find 5 articles; I have found 4 relevant ones and one slightly relevant, but heavily researched, one.

I enjoyed using Google Scholar. I wish it had existed when I did my undergrad degrees. It would have made my research for political science, Italian literature, English literature, and education classes much more enjoyable. While I still had to verify that the articles were from peer-reviewed journals, and find access to them, I did not have to distinguish between someone’s blog entry and someone else’s website. Google Scholar filtered the results so that everything was at least, well scholarly.

I didn’t learn much that was new about APA. I think the only new thing for me was that APA requires using past tense instead of present tense. I do not like APA, and I never have. It is too formal for my preference and the differences between it and MLA are minimal, but annoying.

For this assignment, I learned about the digital divide and digital inequality. Although I had thought about the issue of “haves” and “have-nots” as it relates to my classroom, school, and district, I had never considered the global issues. It was interesting to see how quickly internet access has spread, especially in developing countries, since the development of mobile technology. Even as a classroom teacher, I had not considered the issues of digital inequality. I had a vague notion in my mind that since my students were using social media and researching online, they were “haves” when it came to access and skill. However, after reading about digital inequality, I recognized that my students really don’t have any technological skills. They know how to play with technology, but not how to utilize it to move ahead in life.

In the future, I plan to incorporate technology use more heavily into my instruction. For a few years, I have had a fuzzy plan rolling around in my mind to use student blogs in my classroom. Although I still have not figured out how to maintain security for my students, they are 12 and 13 years-old, I plan to have them blog about their experiences at school, both academic experiences and extra-curricular experiences.

To complete this assignment, I used Google Docs, Google Slides, and Voice Thread. Although I don’t love Google Slides, I’m glad that I had the opportunity to use it. At home, many of my students do not have access to PowerPoint, so it is useful to know how to use Google Slides. I can have my students use Slides at school and then convert to PowerPoint at home if they wish to embellish their presentations further. I enjoyed using Voice Thread. I have never used anything like it before. I liked that I could record more than one comment for each slide and that Voice Thread would stitch them together for me. It allowed me to catch my breath and advance my presentation notes to keep up.

If I had more time, I would solicit suggestions from my coworkers for how to deal with the digital inequality issues at our school. As a part of my school’s tech team, I would like to find workable solutions to our school access issues as well as encourage teachers to incorporate more technology use into their curriculum. When people are part of creating the solution, they are more likely to buy into changes, like incorporating student technology use into their lessons.

One difficulty I had completing this assignment was the sheer volume of reading material. The reading wasn’t the problem, but finding facts I had marked was. Several articles were only available as html pages, so I could not download them to my computer or iPad and highlight as I read. I tried importing them into Diigo, but that didn’t help either. Normally I don’t have a problem finding information I am looking for because I remember where it was located on a page and how far through a document or book that page was located. However, without the visual clues to rely on, it was very difficult to find statistics and quotes I thought I remembered. Interestingly, as I was working on this assignment, a friend shared an article on Facebook that addresses this very issue: Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books. Unfortunately, the author of the article did not include a link to, or citation of, the original study.